The intent is that this processing will happen automatically within 24 hours of the data being uploaded to physics.mnstate.edu. The actual processing will be done on a OSX-based machine (currently esne-bide.mnstate.edu) with the results passed back up to physics.mnstate.edu.
After processing, the raw data files will be compressed and will remain on the physics server.
The purpose of the header processing is to:
The underlying python functions are run with a few convenience scripts to accomplish each of the steps above. They would typically be run in this order:
- generate a table summarizing properties of images in a directory. Each image is one row in the table and the columns are keywords from the FITS headers.
- create files with lists of images missing key information.
Detailed documentation of the individual scripts is available here.
The keywords that are currently added/modified by patch_headers for all files are:
IMAGETYP: Type of image
LATITUDE: [degrees] Observatory latitude
LONGITUD: [degrees east] Observatory longitude
ALTITUDE: [meters] Observatory altitude
LST: Local Sidereal Time at start of observation
JD-OBS: Julian Date at start of observation
MJD-OBS: Modified Julian date at start of observation
OSCAN: True if image has overscan region
OSCANAX: Overscan axis, 1 is NAXIS1, 2 is NAXIS 2
OSCANST: Starting pixel of overscan region
The keywords that are currently added/modified by patch_header for light files only are:
RA: Approximate RA at EQUINOX
DEC: Approximate DEC at EQUINOX
OBJECT: Target of the observations
HA: Hour angle
AIRMASS: Airmass (Sec(Z)) at start of observation
ALT-OBJ: [degrees] Altitude of object, no refraction
AZ-OBJ: [degrees] Azimuth of object, no refraction
Some keywords are purged from the original headers because I don’t trust the values that MaxImDL v5 puts in:
OBJECT
JD
JD-HELIO
OBJCTALT
OBJCTAZ
OBJCTHA
AIRMASS